Google executives recently claimed that YouTube users submit 13-15 hours of video material every minute. Downloads are ten times that.
Although these numbers are impressive, they translate into an average viewer population of 90.000. The Super Bowl typically attracts close to 100 million viewers. American Tv networks measure their audience by the million. Popular programs attract 10-20 million simultaneous viewers.
Can the Internet’s technical infrastructure sustain this? At 1 megabit/sec for each stream, the total YouTube traffic would compare to one sixth of the peak traffic on the Amsterdam Internet Exchange, so that would not be too hard.
Even with growth rates of 40% per year, it will take until 2016 before YouTube passes the 1 million simultaneous viewers mark.
TV is not dead. Yet.
2 Comments on “YouTube is a very small TV network”
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Firehorsepower
28 July 2009 at 17:49>90000, are you on crack? Don't know where your calculation is based on, but it is hogwash. I measure the average traffic caused by YouTube on our core to customer routers (for a big ISP in The NL). This amounts to averages of each internet user to see 9 YT videos on a slow day (based on bandwidth:videolength:videofilesize ratio in timeline of our measured traffic). Extrapolating those using
pve
20 August 2009 at 14:59>15 hours every minute implies 9000 concurrent streams (assuming upload speed equals download speed). Downloads are 10 times that, so 90.000 concurrent streams (and now we no longer have to assume that upload speed equals download speed).
9 videos a day at 5 minutes each equals 45 minutes of viewing time per user. On a user population of 3.2 million you would then have 100.000